Set in contemporary southern West Virginia, Ann Pancake's 2007
novel Strange as This Weather Has Been tells the
stories of a West Virginian family that lives downstream from a
massive mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mine. Like many families
throughout the region, the Ricker family has lived in the same area
for generations and has witnessed the ongoing cycles of boom and
bust that accompany life in the coalfields. Living where the local
stream bears their family name, the Rickers feel profound emotional
connections to a surrounding landscape that serves as a constant
reminder of their family history and their religious beliefs. Yet,
the deployment of MTR on the nearby ridges fundamentally changes
the local landscape and soundscape, transforming ridges into flat
land and replacing the sounds of the surrounding Appalachian mixed
mesophytic forests with those of sirens, blasting, and heavy
equipment. As Uncle Mogey, one of the eldest Rickers, recounts,
these new sounds combined with the dramatic physical
transformations of surrounding lands to de-familiarize his
homeplace, resulting in ongoing headaches and strange dreams
featuring "animals with metal for teeth" and the sound of "an alarm
going off, a horn with a beat to it: Mwaaa. Mwaaa. Mwaaa.
Mwaaa."

MTR is a surface-mining practice used to obtain coal located in
seams situated near the tops of mountain peaks and ridges.
Considered to be a cheaper, more practical, and higher-yielding
alternative to deep mining, MTR was first practiced in the
coalfields of the Central Appalachian Coal Region (CACR) in the
1960s. In 1977, Congress regulated all surface mining, including
MTR, with the passage of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation
Act (SMCRA), which required that mining companies work to return
surface-mined lands to their premining state, and the Clean Water
Act, which placed strict limits on the amount of particulate matter
that mining companies could release into streams and other
waterways. These regulations slowed the expansion of MTR in the
1980s, but the passage of a 1990 amendment to the Clean Air Act,
which sought to reduce acid rain by encouraging the use of
low-sulfur coal (found in abundance in southern West Virginia and
eastern Kentucky), has led to the increased use of MTR techniques
throughout central Appalachia in the past two decades.

In the past decade, MTR has come under increasing scrutiny in
central Appalachian coalfield communities and in the broader debate
about the United States' energy policy. Centering on complex
economic, environmental, and social issues, the MTR debate has
unfolded in public debates, rallies, essay collections, documentary
films, television series, and, most important for the purposes of
this study, music. Music figures prominently in rallies organized
by groups on both sides of the debate, and a wide variety of
regionally and nationally known musicians representing diverse
political perspectives and musical approaches have contributed to
benefit concerts, film soundtracks, and albums in order to garner
support for anti-MTR causes and to mobilize coal supporters in
counterprotest.

This essay works to unpack the role that music and musicalized
rhetoric have played in shaping public debate about the impact of
MTR mining, a practice that eclipsed traditional deep mining and
less invasive surface-mining practices in the early 1990s.
Specifically, I seek to understand how music composed and performed
by proponents and opponents of mountaintop removal invoke a variety
of senses of place to articulate key strategic stances, to generate
political capital, and to empower coalfield residents in West
Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. My work on this
subject lies at the intersections of musicology, cultural
geography, and ecocriticism, intersections that have only recently
begun to receive the attention they deserve in musicological
studies, most notably in the recent and ongoing development of
ecomusicological approaches in the work of Alexander Rehding,
Mitchell Morris, Brooks Toliver, Denise Von Glahn, and others.
Ecomusicology suggests that, much like language and the visual
arts, music is simultaneously influenced by nature and a catalyst
for new conceptions of it.

Particularly instructive to this study is Nancy Guy's work on
musical representations of Taiwan's Tamsui River; she demonstrates
the viability of ecomusicological approaches in exploring how the
lyrics, formal conventions, and performance practices of popular
song can reflect and affect...

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